


Secrets Left to Tell

by syrupwit



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-01 12:49:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16284899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/pseuds/syrupwit
Summary: Part of an origin story.





	Secrets Left to Tell

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kay_obsessive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_obsessive/gifts).



The pirate captain was not the first man she killed, but he was the first she watched die. She had been planning it for weeks. One by one, almost half his crew had fallen ill: chills and sweats, fatigue, poor digestion, a characteristic jaundice about the eyes. A few had started to dream of fire and sand, roiling seas of yellow bile. The woman filling the role of ship's doctor chalked it up to Pandyssian madness and predicted that the affliction would pass before they reached imperial waters. No one suspected that the stoop-shouldered, silent girl enlisted to serve in the galley had been poisoning their meals.

Late at night when the moon was new, she served the captain wine laced with a strong hallucinogen, improvised from scavenged cargo and a few dried herbs. He did not notice her pocket his keys. The few large men not tossing in infirmary cots were up watching the stars or passed out drunk in their bunks. She walked obediently back to the brig, allowed the cook to lock her in, and waited.

By the following sunrise, the captain was pacing and raving on the main deck. The few able crew had been dispatched to subdue him -- she could hear them shouting as he discharged his pistol. No one was watching the prisoners. They were mainly younger children, a few other girls and a mute old man. Destined for slavery or indentured servitude. She freed herself, woke them, and slipped above deck, sharpening a long kitchen knife along the way.

The captain had shot his first mate dead. The ship's doctor was attempting to calm him down, both of her hands slapped to a wound in her shoulder. His inflamed eyes could not focus, his ruddy beard was flecked with blood and spittle. Panic set in. The girl strode across the deck with the knife held in front of her like a ceremonial sword. Some sense in the captain lit upon her; something in him, still seeing, knew her.

"Witch!" he howled, pointing at her. "Devil! Lift your curse!"

She kept walking steadily, even as he staggered towards her, and when he was too close she plunged the knife into his heart.

That night she slept in the captain's cabin, far more comfortably than she ever had before. Spatters of his blood had dried on her face. She would let the sea spray wash them away. The crew not pledged to her were undersea or in the brig now, and the former prisoners bunked in sailors' berths. Bundled in sheets that still bore distasteful traces of the erstwhile captain's vices, she had a dream.

Up until she was on her deathbed, a small part of her would remain as she was then: gawky and graceless, not yet out of her teens, an overgrown child with a killer's hands. In eight months or so, she'd start telling her infant child the story of his father's demise. At this moment she was triumphant, terrified, and just past innocent. The black-eyed boy spoke to her soothingly, as a friend. Like someone he knew.

There is much more to be said regarding the career of this woman: the riot following her alightment in Serkonos, the gradual establishment of her reputation as an apothecary, her bitter and long-lived rivalry with a Morleyan occultist in Karnaca. Whispers of the Void would follow her for years, rumors of unnatural power swirling together with the continued and indisputable proof of her expertise, her pitilessness. But this was the first and last time that the person who would become the mother of Dunwall's most infamous assassin met the Outsider.


End file.
